501893 - When installing a new version of an app, user should be informed of incompatible extensions

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Installer, enhancement)

Description

[pevr]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; fr; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060200 SUSE/3.0.11-0.1.1 Firefox/3.0.11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; fr; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060200 SUSE/3.0.11-0.1.1 Firefox/3.0.11

Some users are frustrated to loose some of their extensions when upgrading to a more recent version.

The installation process should be able to inform the user on extensions he may loose before performing the upgrade.

Also, users running an old version of Firefox might be informed of the compatibility status of their extensions when they are upgrading them ; this way they will be able to notice when "upgrade-blocking" extensions are becoming compatible.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Ian Stirling.]

This is especially critical for some extensions that alter the display in ways that are not easily reversible without the extension installed.

For example, any of the extensions that allow the user to disable commonly used toolbars - navigation or menubar, and place them in one bar.

If you upgrade and disable the extension, you are left in a state that it's impossible to use the browser.

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

We've had UI for this as part of our software update code since around 1.5... now, you're using a Linux distro build, so they're using their own update system, so you don't see that... not sure what a reasonable solution would be at this point other than distro-specific hooks.

Comment 3

[pevr]

The bug has been found on Windows where there is an installation executable (I do not know about Mac OS X). As you stated, Linux is apart.

Many users do not really make the difference between Firefox releases but yet they are familiar with adding extensions to improve their web experience. They cannot imagine upgrading could lead to a loss of feature and when they eventually figure out, it is too late, the new version is there and there is no trivial roll back process.

Comment 4

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

So what you really want is for the installer to duplicate the functionality of the software update system... that's not so easy either.

If you do "check for updates" or are offered a major update (i.e. 3.0 to 3.5) we have UI to tell you if your extensions will stop working.  It's harder to do without the app running.

Comment 5

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

Removing DUPEME since there is no bug for the installer to accomplish this.

Getting the installer to accomplish this would be to say the least extremely difficult and would require the app to do most of the work. One thing I considered a couple of years ago was coming up with UI so the add-ons mgr could perform a check of the installed add-ons using a future version of the app but even this would be rather ugly... this would at least solve the problem for all platforms.

btw: we are also likely going to move to using MSI's in the future at which point getting the installer to do this will likely be even more difficult.

As this bug report stands in regards to adding this functionality to the installer the cost / value of doing this is way too high so I am wontfix'ing this. It might be possible to add this functionality to the app but instead of moving this bug to the add-ons mgr component it would likely be better to file a new bug so the request is clearer if you'd like this functionality in the app.